Amy Winehouse BBC performance = awesome (so sad she’s dead)

Ugh. Poor Amy Winehouse. (Found dead, 27, etc. etc. as you know by now). That girl never had a chance, having totally cemented her place in pop culture with the brilliant, tragic, defiance of the Back to Black album. I’m sure she felt that her credibility relied heavily on her consistency. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this over the past few years, and even tried writing about it three years ago in an article I’m too embarrassed to link to, because I didn’t do a very good job. Thankfully, my friend John Woods, of the Wetspots, summed it up pretty nicely when he posted on Facebook, “These poor fuckers who paint themselves into a corner by so brilliantly chronicling their badassery [… ] If you never had street cred you don’t have to keep proving it.”

YES. That’s what I was trying to say.

As Robert Cialdini discusses in Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, humans are remarkably swayed by their desire to be/appear consistent.

Here’s a brilliant performance by Amy at the BBC. When she was good, she was very very good. (Found via dangerousminds.net)